


Five AUs I Will Never Write

by Lacinia



Category: Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: 5 Things, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Mind Control, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-16
Updated: 2012-11-16
Packaged: 2017-11-18 19:13:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/564337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lacinia/pseuds/Lacinia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are a thousand worlds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five AUs I Will Never Write

ONE

 

“There are a thousand worlds,” she whispers, and she is not sentimental about anything, not a single thing, but she will give him this. “There are a thousand worlds, and I swear in one of them we are happy. In one of them you are just a circus marksman, and I am an acrobat, and every night the act ends with you and me and an arrow and an apple. Can you imagine it, Clint?” she asks, but there isn’t a response, there can’t be, and eventually she walks away, leaving him in a puddle of his own blood, only barely breathing.

 

TWO

 

In most other worlds, they both hesitate for a crucial second—a moment of mutual madness neither one is quite able to explain, afterwards. Just for a second, they looked into each others’ eyes, and Clint didn’t let go of the string, and Natasha did not pull the trigger.

But this is not one of those worlds, and Natasha fails to see something in his level gaze, and her bullet punches a perfect hole in his sternum. 

He gazes up at the clear sky. There are three stars he looks for, always. Orion’s Belt, bright and reliable and obvious even to the novice stargazer. But the city lights bleach the sky out and blood loss makes his exceptional eyesight dim. His heartbeat flutters, then fails, and he dies without ever quite picking them out. 

Two years later, an enemy of hers sends an assassin just as good as Hawkeye, only he doesn’t have a surfeit of mercy.

 

THREE

 

Betrayal is, as ever, easy. 

It goes like this: on the second day of their vacation she feeds him a carefully measured dose of sedative, and he’s incapacitated long before he figures out what’s going on. 

“You…you drugged me,” he slurs. 

“Yes,” she replies, and cuffs both hands to the bolted-down chair. She shackles his feet as well. There’s no need to take chances. She watches, unmoved, as slow realization washes over his face.

“Who do you work for?” he asks.

She raises an eyebrow. “This is my interrogation. You’ll regain feeling soon, and then we’ll begin.”

Four hours later, she pauses. “This can all come to a stop,” she says. 

He laughs, a wet, hollowed-out sound. 

“I’ve been authorized to turn you,” she continues.

“You can’t possibly think that I’ll—”

She presses a gun to his head. “I think you will, Clint. I think someday you want to sit on a beach with a cold beer. I think you want to feel again the wind in your hair.” She leans in, whispers her final words, her lips only half an inch from his ear. “I think you want to live to draw back that bow of yours.” He tips his head away from her, eyes wide. But she can see him swallow, and she knows he’s hooked. “How would you like to work for the Red Room?” she asks, and presses the gun hard into his skin. “Going once, going twice…”

“Fine,” he says. “Fine.”

 

FOUR

 

Natasha watches the steady rain of ships through the portal and makes the sensible decision. SHIELD will continue to fight: they are very brave. But Natasha values some things more than bravery, so she limps on her broken leg to the flight deck. On the way she pages Pureka, the pilot she’d used for the Stuttgard mission. He’d done well; the only complaint that she’d had was that she didn’t like sharing a cockpit with anyone other than Clint. 

“Mission from Fury,” she says, and doesn’t bother to hide the fact that her voice is ragged from fatigue. 

She takes all her weapons with her, but leaves the personal effects. She’d like a disguise or twelve, but she doesn’t carry her own on the Helicarrier, which has its own wardrobe rooms and stylists to help the undercover operatives. 

She has Pureka drop her at her London safehouse, and he probably doesn’t ever find out she went rogue, seeing as the Helicarrier was ash by the time he got back to the States. 

In London Natasha carefully slips into her cover, one even Clint didn’t know about. She inventories her supplies and reaches out to her local contacts, and weathers the invasion with bitter experience while her neighbors starve around her.

Two months in she finally gets a golden window, and jumps Clint while he’s headed to collect the Queen’s official surrender. Natasha took a great deal of care to make sure they wouldn’t be interrupted, so their fight is short. At the end, Natasha bounces him off a wall and kicks him in the head for good measure. She drags him to the waiting car, and stashes him in her flat while the world erupts into a planet-wide manhunt for Loki’s missing second-in-command. 

She has a knife next to the chair, just in case the cognitive recalibration doesn’t take, but he wakes up as himself. She uses the knife to cut the zip ties, instead, and tells him to gear up. They don’t waste a moment on the joy of reunion or on useless mourning for their brothers-in-arms and their poor, burned world.

They have a god to kill. 

 

FIVE

 

The Red Room picks a different girl, and she dies long before he is born.

**Author's Note:**

> These are from my WIP folder, but I realized they were never going to make it to fully-fledged fics. Anyone interested is welcome to take them and develop the ideas further. Just drop me a line to let me know!


End file.
